Snake Eater (15 page)

I hugged her. She cried against my chest.

“It’s not fair,” said Cammie. “I guess that guy—that stranger—and Daniel were the only two people in the world who got to read it. And now it’s gone.”

“And so,” I said, “are both of them.”

Cammie heated up some homemade chowder and we watched it snow while we ate. She held me tightly at the door, but she didn’t cry.

“Will you come back?” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

She tilted back and looked at me. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For… being my friend.”

“I’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”

She kissed me on the cheek.

“And you’ve got to make me a promise,” I said.

“What?”

“Keep your door locked.”

She smiled. “I left it open for you.”

“How…?”

“I knew you’d stop in. At least I hoped you would.” She shrugged. “I don’t know what else I was hoping. Forgive me. I’m glad we didn’t—”

I touched her lips with my finger. “Nothing to forgive,” I said.

The snow wet my face as I walked back to my car, and after I got started it made slush on my windshield. It was melting on the pavement, but it had begun to stick to the dead leaves in the oak trees along the roadside.

I expected it would turn to rain as I headed east.

A mile down the road from Daniel’s house the cruiser materialized in my rearview mirror. He switched on the blue flashers and his high beams at the same time as he hit the siren. I pulled onto the shoulder and turned off the ignition. He stopped behind me.

I lit a cigarette. Through my rearview mirror I watched him step slowly from the cruiser and saunter toward me. It was Oakley. He paused to peer at my rear license plate. I rolled down the window. Tiny pellets of snow blew in and melted against my cheek. He came up to the side of my car and stood just behind my left shoulder so I couldn’t see his face.

“License and registration,” he said.

I found the registration in the glove compartment. I slid my license from my wallet. I handed the documents to him. I didn’t ask him why he pulled me over. He didn’t offer to tell me. He went back to his cruiser. I smoked my cigarette and waited.

He was back five minutes later. He bent down to the open window, braced himself with his hand on the windowframe, and said, “You were going too fast. Roads’re wet and slippery. You’ve gotta go careful, conditions like this. I could have cited you. I’m doing you a favor.”

Oakley looked older up close. His short dark hair was liberally flecked with gray, and the skin around his eyes was puffy and cross-hatched. He was forty-five, give or take a few years.

He wore a wedding band on the ring finger of his left hand. For some reason, that surprised me. The only Richard Oakley I knew was the one Daniel and Cammie had described for me. It didn’t seem likely that anybody could love that Oakley.

He also had some letters tattooed on the back of his hand. They were crude and blurred, and they were upside down to me. But I made them out.

“Semper Fi,” they read.

Oakley had been a marine.

He thrust my papers through the window. “Slow down, okay?”

I took the papers. “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

He hesitated as if he wanted to say something else. Then he stepped away from my car. “You can go,” he said. “Just drive carefully.”

“Yes. Okay.”

I pulled away. In my rearview mirror I could see Sergeant Richard Oakley standing there beside the road, watching me go.

G
OVERNMENT CENTER OCCUPIES SEVERAL
city blocks between Cambridge and Congress streets, on the back side of Beacon Hill. It was erected on the corpse of Scollay Square back in the sixties, and there are still some of us who mourn the demolition. Gone is the Old Howard, where a kid could pay two bits to hear a bald man tell dirty jokes and then watch a fat lady strip down to pasties and a G-string. Gone, too, the Blue Parrot, where a teenaged boy could buy a beer, no questions asked, get propositioned by a forty-year-old hooker, and be invited to step into an alley for a fistfight with a sailor, all in the same evening.

Now it’s all massive concrete-and-glass buildings and brick plazas. Progress.

Charlie McDevitt’s office is high in the J.F.K. Federal Building. I got there around four on Wednesday afternoon. Charlie had called that morning and said he didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.

When Shirley, his secretary, saw me walk into the reception area, she beamed at me. I went over and kissed her cheek. She stood up and hugged me against her great pillowy bosom. “Ah, Mr. Coyne. ’Tis good to see ye.”

“You’re looking terrific, sweetheart,” I said.

Which was true. She had snow-white hair permed into an elaborate do, smooth pink skin, and a healthy abundance of flesh. The prototypical grandma.

“Will ye be takin’ him fishin’, Mr. Coyne?” she said.

“No, alas,” I said. “Fishing season’s about ended for the year.”

“Maybe come winter some of that silly ice fishing, then.”

I nodded. “Maybe.”

“Ye should. Himself’s needin’ some distracting.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Well, go on right in, then. He’s expecting you.”

I pushed open the door. Charlie was at his desk talking into his phone. He raised his eyebrows when he saw me and jerked his head at the empty chair by his desk. I sat. He rummaged in his bottom drawer and came up with a half-full pint of Early Times. He set it on his desk. I reached over to the sideboard and snagged two water glasses. I poured two fingers into each and slid one of them to Charlie’s waiting hand.

Charlie said, “Yeah, okay, get back to me, then,” and hung up the phone. He let out a long sigh. “Hey,” he said to me.

“Hey, yourself.”

He picked up his glass, gestured toward me with it, and took a sip. I did the same.

He rummaged among the papers on his desk top and found a sheet of computer paper. He unfolded it in front of him. “Those names,” he said, looking up at me.

I nodded.

“You were hoping to locate them.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said, “I located six of them. But it’s not going to help you.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “They’re all dead.”

I lit a cigarette. “Dead, huh?”

“Yup.”

“And the other two?”

He shook his head. “Couldn’t locate them.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning they seem to have disappeared themselves.”

“Disappeared?”

“Vanished. Run away. Who the hell knows?”

“Dead, maybe.”

Charlie nodded. “Maybe.”

I swallowed some Early Times. It burned all the way down. “So what do you think?”

“About the connection with Daniel McCloud, you mean?”

I nodded.

Charlie shrugged. “Well, he’s dead, now, too.”

“And if these guys are dead—”

“It means they didn’t kill Daniel,” said Charlie.

“Let’s have a look,” I said.

He turned the printout around for me. “Mostly FBI file stuff,” he said. “I got a little from the IRS and we even had some data in our own files. I couldn’t print it out for you, of course. I’d have twelve G-men with submachine guns pointing at me in about a minute if I did that. But I made some notes and put ’em together for you. What you’ve got there is a summary. Best I could do. I wasn’t sure what you wanted.”

I skimmed through it, then went back to the top and read Charlie’s notes slowly.

William Johnson. Seven arrests. All drug related. One conviction, served six months at Massachusetts Correctional/Billerica in 1981. His frozen body was found behind a condemned warehouse in Springfield in the winter of 1984. He had been stabbed nine times in the chest and abdomen. He died from the blood loss, not the cold. Assailant unknown.

Carmine Repucci. Small-time thief originally from East Boston. Spent time in prison on three separate occasions, including nine months in Billerica in 1981. His last address was in Chicopee. Found dead in his rented room the day after Christmas of 1987, shot four times in the face and chest. No arrests for his murder.

I glanced up at Charlie. “These first two,” I said. “Johnson and Repucci?”

He nodded. “Both crooks. Murdered.”

“Daniel had their names on index cards. All the others had photos.”

Charlie shrugged. “Yeah? So?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“None of the others were murdered,” said Charlie.

Boris Kekko. Master’s degree candidate in international relations at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst campus. Died of a broken neck in March of 1985 from a fall into an elevator shaft at one of the UMass high-rise dormitories. Charlie had noted in parentheses, “Elevator surfing??” I remembered that game. The kids would get themselves beered up, then jam open the doors and ride up and down on top of the elevator. Sometimes they stepped or fell into the open shaft. Sometimes they fell off the elevator. I remembered Boris Kekko’s photograph. He had an open, Slavic face. Balding. Middle-aged. Not a kid.

James Whitlaw. Sales rep for a small computer firm. In August of 1985 Whitlaw drove his Honda Civic into a bridge abutment near Narragansett Bay. The medical examiner’s report indicated he had been legally intoxicated. Whitlaw was the one whose wife I had reached.

Mitchell Evans. Professor of comparative government at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Disappeared between semesters in January 1986.

Michael DiSimione, one of the Providence DiSimiones, the crack cocaine lords of New England. Arrested many times, never indicted. Had agreed to testify before a Senate committee in return for immunity and admission in the Federal Witness Protection Program when, in October of 1986, he apparently changed his mind and shot himself behind his right ear in a New York City hotel room.

Bertram Wanzer. Software engineer for a now defunct electronics firm in Holyoke. Disappeared sometime in the summer of 1987, divorced by his abandoned wife three years later. I had talked with his stepson Robert.

Jean Beaulieu, independent trucker, accidentally drowned in the Merrimack River south of Manchester, New Hampshire, on July 4, 1989 when intoxicated.

I looked up at Charlie. “Jesus,” I said.

He shrugged.

“What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Six of ’em are dead.”

“Maybe all eight,” I said.

He nodded. “Could well be.”

“And now Daniel.”

“He’d make number nine,” said Charlie.

“And you might add Al Coleman to the list.” I lit a cigarette and stared out Charlie’s office window. “Except for their all being dead—or at least six of them, not counting Daniel and Coleman—what’s the connection?”

“You tell me.”

“Let’s play with it.”

“Well,” he said, “they’re all males.”

I nodded impatiently. “Yeah, okay. Something else, though.”

“I can’t see it,” said Charlie. “Except they were all on Daniel’s list.”

“Which means they
are
connected. Daniel knew what it was.”

Charlie swiveled his head to look at me. “His book?”

I nodded. “That’d be my guess. He was researching something, and found it. Whatever it was, these names are the key.” I shook my head. “If they were all murdered, or all crooks, or all in the same business, or something, it might start to make sense.”

“Or if they were all born in the same hospital, or went to the same school. They knew each other. Were friends.”

“Or enemies.”

“Or had the same enemy.”

“They all fucked the same woman,” I said.

“Christ, Coyne,” said Charlie. “Maybe they were all veterans. In the army together.”

“Not with Daniel they weren’t,” I said. “Brian Sweeney already checked that out.” I snapped my fingers. “Agent Orange victims, maybe. Like Daniel.”

“Maybe they were all those things,” said Charlie. “Or some combination. Into something together. There’s gotta be a connection.”

I stared down at the printout. “Well,” I said, “I don’t see it here.”

“I can dig a little more.”

“Yeah?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“You want me to buy you lunch or something?”

He waved his hand impatiently. “I’m as curious as you are. Daniel was my friend, too.”

“His book,” I said. “Wish I could lay my hands on it. He knew something.”

“Bet your ass he did.”

“And he got murdered,” I said. “And so did Al Coleman.”

“Seems like more than coincidence, doesn’t it?” said Charlie.

A
FTER A MICROWAVED TV
dinner that evening—chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, and gravy—I unfolded Charlie’s printout onto my dining-room table. I took turns reading the dim dot-matrix printing and staring out the sliding glass doors at the dark harbor six floors below my apartment building.

There were a few lights blinking down there on the cold black water.

Not many lights flickered in my cold black brain. At least, none that helped me to see who killed Daniel McCloud.

I saw some isolated connections on the list. The two guys on index cards, the names without photographs, William Johnson and Carmine Repucci, were the only two who had been murdered. Both had spent time at M.C.I./Billerica in 1981, both were small-time hoodlums, both ended up living in the Springfield area. Most likely they knew each other.

There was a student and a professor. International relations and comparative government were both specialties in political science.

There was a computer sales rep and a software engineer. Same industry.

There was one suicide, but it was possible that Jean Beaulieu, the trucker who drowned, made two.

Two had disappeared. It was logical to hypothesize that they, like the others on the list, were dead.

None of the deaths was by natural causes. Not counting the two disappearances, there were one suicide, two murders, and three accidents.

A clever killer can make his work look like a suicide or an accident. If he succeeds in hiding a dead body, he can make it look like a disappearance.

All eight could have been murders.

What had Daniel learned?

Did his name belong on that list? Number nine? That’s where it belonged chronologically.